Sometimes, what I need in the morning is a short blast of guitar/noise/pop. Not every morning, I grant you, but today Male Bonding provided the spark. Good look, too. Reminds me of my days off.
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Released October 11th 2010
When I was at university I read a fair bit about Arshile Gorky and it seems he was as much a shape-shifter in his life as he was in his biomorphic art. No-one really knows when he was born and his personal life was mired in tragedy until his early death. I’ve never obsessed over Gorky like I have with other artists, but I definitely find his imagery alluring and therein lies his appeal to me, rather than personal facts.
The title of this painting is amazing – a real breath of fresh air compared to the blankness of ‘Untitled’ (which has its own merits in allowing an artwork to speak for itself). It’s a vivid title, just like the painting, which creates a world for you to explore and mull over.
I really relish the task of naming songs or albums, as it happens (my friends and I have spent hours laughing at fictional band names, but actual band names are a pain in the bum…).
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“I walk in the gleams of dust/that mirror us.”
From ‘The Light of the Blade’ by André du Bouchet.
I look for places where language has been used wisely.
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I saw Grace Jones last year at the Sage in Gateshead and she changed her outfit after each song, chuntering to the audience offstage through her microphone. She had a different hat for each song, including one designed by Chris Levine that created a mirrorball effect when lasers were zapped towards it. At that moment the room exploded with blinding light. It was an extraordinary show.
Andy Warhol created the above image in his typical manner, which, despite its ubiquity, remains a startling and uplifting style.
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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing counter-culture film-maker Kenneth Anger introduce a selection of his colour-saturated films at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle.
He was less weird than his legend suggests and was wearing a fantastic red sweater with ‘ANGER’ knitted in relief across its chest.
The offbeat imagery in his films has been massively influential on all sorts of artists and I thought I’d share a slice here.
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All beautiful (principally because the song’s beautiful); one haunting, one dramatic, one wistful.
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